In manufacturing process industries, technicians use handheld communicators, such as a HONEYWELL field device configurator (FDC) and an EMERSON 475 field communicator, to access field transmitters (also referred to as “smart transmitters”) that use industrial protocols (such as Highway Addressable Remote Transducer (HART) and FOUNDATION FIELDBUS (FF) protocols) in the field. Many manufacturing plants or other industrial facilities have remote areas, such as tank farms, water treatment facilities, well heads, remote platforms, and pipelines; and the field instruments within these industrial facilities are installed at difficult to access or hazardous locations. In order to use the handheld communicator, the technician needs to physically reach the field instrument at such locations. In order to reach these locations, the field technician could climb a ladder or crawl through a crawlspace. Not only is the field technician subjected to inconvenience due to the difficulty in accessing field instruments and in connecting the handheld communicator to field instruments via a wire connector (e.g., alligator clips), but also, the field technician is subjected to carrying multiple handheld devices. This approach of accessing a field instrument leads to operational delays, higher costs, and has potential failure modes.
For some use cases, the field technicians need to carry other portable devices in addition to existing handheld communicators. As a use case example, some field issues are resolved by having the field technician take a photo of a field instrument or of the local display content on the display of the field instrument. Current handheld communicators do not provide this camera capability. As a result, a mobile device with a camera has been utilized to address this need, which means for image capturing purposes, the field technician is subjected to carrying yet another device to hazardous locations. As another example, some technicians rely on information relayed from a control room over a walkie-talkie, which is another additional handheld device that technicians need to carry.
Field instruments that use industrial protocols, such as a HART communication protocol, have to operate within a current budget of less than 3.8 milliamperes (mA) in order work with (for example, transmit and receive) 4-20 mA signals. This current budget makes it difficult to add wireless connectivity, which requires more current for transmit and receive operations.